Apple sells 1m videos in 19 days

Apple has sold more than 1m video downloads since it began offering the service on 12 October, the Mac maker said today.

Passing that milestone so quickly has certainly impressed CEO Steve Jobs. "Selling one million videos in less than 20 days strongly suggests there is a market for legal video downloads," quoth he.

"Our next challenge is to broaden our content offerings, so that customers can enjoy watching more videos on their computers and new iPods," he added.

Indeed. The UK iTunes Music Store currently offers a heap of music videos, old and new, plus the obligatory series of shorts from Jobs' other company, Pixar. The US store also offers episodes of popular TV shows, but alas there's nonesuch here.

How many folk, we wonder, would cough up £1.89 to watch something they forgot to tape the evening before. Still, Apple's deal with Disney will have to be extended to similar arrangements with other TV companies before ITMS can truly be regarded as an alternative to TiVo, other PVRs or even the still-much-used-for-timeshifting VCR.

That may nontheless be what Apple has in mind - which could explain the company's relectance to equip its iMac home computer and media centre with anything as mundane as a TV tuner. ®